Between the ages of twenty and forty we
are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning
the difference between accidental limitations which it is our study to outgrow
and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass
with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying
to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is
during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another
writer or by some ideology When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos
of a work of art, “I know what I like,” he is really saying “I have no taste of
my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu,” because between twenty and
forty, the surest sign that a man has genuine taste of his own is that he is
uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves
altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the
proper guide to what we should read.
- W. H. AUDEN
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